


The Apeboy

by LilacFree



Category: Dragon Ball, Tarzan - Edgar Rice Burroughs
Genre: Gen, Plotbunny Spawn, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-25 19:51:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16204493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LilacFree/pseuds/LilacFree
Summary: Maybe you've already heard this story, but you might not be right about what story it is.  Less a crossover than a melding.  Also, Bulma is awesome.





	The Apeboy

_You think you know the story, don’t you?  The baby boy raised by ape-like humanoids in the African jungle, you know who he is, you say?  You’re telling me you’ve heard this story before and you know all about the leopard skin loincloth and the call that rings out when the jungle lord does battle?_  
  
_I know you've heard how all this started, but give me a chance and I think you’ll be surprised._  
  
  
  
Kala cradled the baby to her chest and it eagerly latched on to her nipple.  He drew strongly at the taste of milk and she cupped her callused fingers around his head.  His hair was thick and springy on his skull.  She hoped he wasn’t as weak as the white apes Kerchak had killed.  The rest of her Mangani tribe grumbled but seeing that Kala was set on replacing her dead balu with this orphan, they ignored the matter.  The weak, puling thing would die soon, no doubt of it.  Sheeta the leopard would hear its endless cries for food and come carry it off.  Kala would get over it, and mate again, and forget.  It was the way of the jungle.  
  
He didn’t die.  They started calling him ‘Tarzan’ for his pale, hairless skin.  He was a lively and mischievous child, always ready to tussle with the other balus of the tribe.  In the beginning, he always lost.  Only Kala’s intervention kept him alive.  She nursed him with as tender a mother love as had ever been, and he survived.  No, he thrived.  He grew stronger, learned to hold his own in a fight and run when he could not, and learned to forage for food himself.  The Mangani were always searching for food in the deep jungle and Tarzan had a greater appetite than any of them.  He spent the greater part of his days feeding himself, with little fear except of the bulls of his own tribe.  In the dimly lit spaces under the rain forest canopy the Mangani were strongest of all save Tantor the elephant.  Rarely did Sheeta the leopard dare threaten them.  
  
One day the inevitable happened.  By a pool, Tarzan was staring at his reflection, his hands running through his wild hair that grew so lushly on his head and hardly anywhere else on his body.  He saw a glimmer of yellow in the water, but it wasn’t a tasty fish or snake.  It was Sheeta, dropping onto him from a tree branch, cruel fangs gaped to sink into his neck.  Tarzan dived forward into the water, suffering only a glancing slash from the leopard’s claws.  It made him angry.  Only yesterday he had climbed all over an adult male repeatedly punching him until he submitted.  He would find out now who was stronger, him or Sheeta.  
  
The big cat had splashed into the water after him, but was now backing up.  Tarzan charged and struck it in the nose, then tried to clamber onto its back.  The loose hide over the supple body hampered his grip, and Sheeta turned and bit into his shoulder.  But Tarzan knew pain well by now.  What didn’t kill him made him stronger; what didn’t eat him — he ate.  His teeth fastened into Sheeta’s ear and he pried those jaws open until bone broke.  He got a leg over Sheeta’s back and held on tight while the cat writhed in its death throes.  He stood over the body and howled to the treetops of the victory that thrilled through every sinew.  
  
  
  
_What?  There’s nothing new here?  The Burroughs estate is on the phone?  Put up or shut up, you say?_  
  
_Okay, you asked for it._  
  
  
  
“You’ll be sorry if those capsules open inside you!” she yelled from the safety of a branch.  The hippo dumped a pile of poo under the tree then waded smugly back into the river.  The girl crawled back to rest against the trunk and stretched her legs out along the branch.  One by one she checked the numerous pockets of her safari outfit, hoping for a stray capsule that would provide shelter or food or a communications device.  Ah, there was the food capsule; and a clothing capsule.  She could die with clean panties.  Besides the two capsules, the most technological items she had were a pocketknife and her antique explorer’s watch with the built-in compass.  “You could have had a built-in capsule but NO, you wanted to look like a Victorian adventuress!  Okay, genius.  Now what?”  The Dragon Radar had fallen out of her pack before the hippo had dragged it off her.  Right, find it.  Find it, find the Dragon Balls, spend the rest of her life eating magically mandated strawberries.  Right.  Bulma Briefs settled her pith helmet, brushed insects off her legs and swung herself off the branch.  Right into ankle deep hippo poo.

“#*$&!”  There were no words, just phonemes of sheer exasperation.  She wiped the boots off against the tree as best she could then followed along the bank of the river.  Maybe smelling like hippo poo would encourage the hippos to ignore her.  
  
Little did she know that curious eyes were watching her every move.  Tarzan marveled over the Tarmangani she.  He had never seen hair the color of flowers.  Like his, it grew only on her head.  She also looked weak, but she had escaped the hippo and yelled at it, so at least she was not cowardly.  He began to follow along behind her.  She was so noisy that she did not notice him, or that she was following a game trail.  She certainly would not notice Sheeta, or Histah the snake.  When a pair of antelope burst out of a thicket and fled down the path, instead of hunting this juicy prey, the she dropped down with an nonthreatening grunt.  The round thing fell off her head.  He walked up behind her picked it up to set on his own head.  It wouldn’t fit over his springy hair.  
  
Bulma reached back for her fallen hat, still recovering from being nearly trampled by the local wildlife.  Her hand lit on something warm.  It felt sort of fleshy and she explored it by touch.  Wasn’t that a toe?  She tilted her head back and stared at the boy in the leopard skin sarong.  Yes, a toe.  She was never wrong. 

“Hi?  Hi.  Hi!”  She wriggled around to face him.  His face held a faintly perplexed expression as he tried to fit her pith helmet over his wild mane of hair.  How did he keep those spikes up?  Mud?  Blood?  Hippo poo?  “Hello.  I’m Bulma.”  
  
She couldn’t even speak correctly. It sounded a little like 'Wet he blue.'  “Tarzan is strong," he warned her.  "Sheeta will eat you, Blue.”  He took an experimental bite of the round thing, then spit it out.  The sweat taste was excellent but it was too dry to be good eating.  
  
“Hey!”  Bulma tried to grab the helmet back, but he leapt straight up into the air and with one hand pulled himself up into a tree.  His eyebrows drew together and his lips curled back from his teeth.  She stared up at him, indignant and a little afraid.  He had moved faster than her eyes could track.  He looked like a pre-teen but was strongly muscled and covered in scars.  “I guess you don’t speak English.  But you do speak.  Hmm.”  She opened her pocket knife and traced a picture of the Dragon Radar on the ground.  “Have you seen that?  If you give me that you can keep the hat.”  She was talking to hear herself talk.  Always direct your conversation to the smartest person in the room, her father had once told her.  
  
He watched Blue’s strange actions.  Was she digging for grubs or worms?  He peered through one of the holes in the tasteless round thing the she had wanted back.  How did it help her head?  What was that shape on the ground?  He dropped the helmet and looked more closely.  He’d seen something like that.  He hadn’t been able to eat that, either.  
  
Whatever the language barrier, his face spoke of recognition to Bulma.  She patted the ground by her drawing.  “Yes!  Where is it?”  She pointed from the drawing then to different directions, her eyes all the while on his face.  His face brightened, then he hurtled himself into the bush.  Bulma snatched up the dropped hat and jammed it sideways on her head, trying to keep up with him.  But for all his speed, he made no more noise than a breeze and she lost him immediately.  “Drat him,” she muttered, and paced back and forth.  If he was going to bring it to her, then better to stay where he knew where she was and where she almost knew where she was.  “Run off and leave me in the jungle without so much as a grunt you later.”  She hated waiting!  
  
Her patience allergy was salved when the jungle boy turned up with the Dragon Radar.  She held out her hands but he just stared at them.  She touched the device and turned it on.  He dropped it instantly as the screen turned on, and backed up warily.  “You’ve never seen a TV show or had a bath, have you?  Kid, you don’t know what living is.  I wonder what you’d wish for?”  He drew near her again, plainly curious as she checked the readout against her compass.  He grabbed her wrist, pulling her off balance like she was a marionette.  “Hey!” she protested, then softened her voice as his grip tightened.  “Don’t manhandle a lady, hmm?  Be a nice Mowgli.”  He relaxed his grip, but insisted on moving her wrist to watch the wobble of the compass needle.  If he meant her harm, he could have already hurt her, but he was just a curious boy.  He let go at last and she put her hand on her chest.  “Bulma.  BULMA.”  The moved her hand to his chest, which was like steel under the tanned skin.  What had he said?  "Tarzan.”  
  
His face brightened again.  “Tarzan!”  He slammed her in the chest hard enough to make her cough.  “Lulm’wa!”  
  
“Close enough.  Want to see the world, Tarzan?”  She started to move in the direction indicated by the Dragon Radar, glancing at him with what she hoped was an inviting expression.  He began to drift along behind her.  Occasionally he would dart away, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes longer so that she thought he’d gotten bored.  But eventually he would appear out of nowhere, usually with food in his mouth.  Especially if she was in trouble.  The hippo came after her again and he punched it in the side.  A capsule was triggered and suddenly a small cabin was sitting in the middle of an exploded hippo.  Bulma stood there gaping and running numbers in her head.  He had knocked a ton of hippo aside.  How strong was this kid?  And why was she just now noticing he had a TAIL?  
  
When Bulma found the seventh Dragon Ball, instead of wishing for strawberries she wished for Tarzan to be able to speak English.  She certainly was sick of trying to teach him.  When years later she found out he was an alien, it all made a lot more sense.  
  
  
  
_When you said you knew the story, were you right twice?_

**Author's Note:**

> A/N Sometimes you can't stop yourself from writing even if you should have. I once wrote a 'what if John Winchester found baby Kal-El' story but like this, it was just a fragment. Hopefully someone enjoys this idea besides me.


End file.
